le labour under of being satisfied with pure
pleasure as a goal is due to their want of imagination, or rather to
their being dominated by an imagination which is exclusively human.

The author's estrangement from reality reappears in his treatment of
egoism, and most of all in his "Free Man's Religion." Egoism, he
thinks, is untenable because "if I am right in thinking that my good
is the only good, then every one else is mistaken unless he admits
that my good, not his, is the only good." "Most people ... would admit
that it is better two people's desires should be satisfied than only
one person's.... Then what is good is not good _for me_ or _for you_,
but is simply good." "It is, indeed, so evident that it is better to
secure a greater good for _A_ than a lesser good for _B_, that it is
hard to find any still more evident principle by which to prove this.
And if _A_ happens to be some one else, and _B_ to be myself, that
cannot affect the question, since it is irrelevant to the general
question who _A_ and _B_ may be." To the question, as the logician
states it after transforming men into letters, it is certainly
irrelevant; but it is not irrelevant to the case as it arises in
nature. If two goods are somehow rightly pronounced to be equally
good, no circumstance can render one better than the other. And if the
locus in which the good is to arise is somehow pronounced to be
indifferent, it will certainly be indifferent whether that good arises
in me or in you. But how shall these two pronouncements be made? In
practice, values cannot be compared save as represented or enacted in
the private imagination of somebody: for we could not conceive that an
alien good _was_ a good (as Mr. Russell cannot conceive that the life
of an ecstatic oyster is a good) unless we could sympathise with it in
some way in our own persons; and on the warmth which we felt in so
representing the alien good would hang our conviction that it was
truly valuable, and had worth in comparison with our own good. The
voice of reason, bidding us prefer the greater good, no matter who is
to enjoy it, is also nothing but the force of sympathy, bringing a
remote existence before us vividly _sub specie boni_. Capacity for
such sympathy measures the capacity to recognise duty and therefore,
in a moral sense, to have it. Doubtless it is conceivable that all
wills should become co-operative, and that nature should be ruled
magically by an exact and universal